1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of automatic controllers, and more particularly, to programmable controllers for use with television receivers and like equipment.
2. Prior Art
Many systems have been proposed for the automatic control of television receivers, that is, automatic channel selection for particular times of the day based upon programming information entered into the controller at some previous time. Most of these systems, however, are in substantial part mechanical systems which are not particularly easy to program, thereby being relatively expensive to manufacture and difficult to use. Accordingly, such systems have not enjoyed significant commerical use on conventional receivers.
Simple programmable television receiver controllers would provide a number of advantages over conventional channel selectors, and even over remote controlled channel selectors for a number of reasons. There may be programs of particular merit or interest which a viewer does not want to miss. However, the viewer's attention may inadvertently be drawn to another channel at the time, thereby failing to change channels to the more desirable program at the appropriate time. Also at the present time a number of programs and movies beng shown on T.V. are directed toward an adult audience, which programs may be undesirable or outright unsuitable for viewing by children, a situation which may only be expected to increase in the future. In addition, more and more homes have at least one television receiver controllable at least a substantial amount of the time by children, whereby with conventional channel selectors the "viewers discretion" cannot be exercised by a parent. Accordingly, a programmable controller could be programmed periodically, such as once a week, so that the receiver will automatically select those programs of highest merit or viewer interest, and/or to select predetermined unobjectionable programs at times when objectionable programming is being televised on other channels. As an alternative, of course, objectionable programming itself could be programmed for the purposes of locking out such programs from the viewer's selections, e.g. eliminating such programming from the channel selections accessible from the manual channel selector.
U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,215,798 and 3,388,308 disclose automatic television programming systems of the mechanical or electromechanical type, whereby a rotary device mechanically tied to a time clock is programmed to provide some physical movement indicative of the channel to be selected at that time. Devices of the same general type involving some form of motor driven switching unit are also disclosed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,755,424, 3,496,438, and 3,569,839. In all of these patents the mechanical complexity of the system disclosed is believed to preclude the widespread adoption thereof on receivers intended for consumer use. Further, most of these systems are operative on a number of switching signals equal to the number of selections desired, though some coding to somewhat reduce the complexity of such systems is known, such as that in U.S. Pat. No. 3,496,438. Also, obviously timing mechanisms of the electromechanical type for various other applications are also known, that disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 3,603,961 being but one example of such devices.